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Charliemopps writes "An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was 'no doubt' Wakefield was responsible."

Child 11 was among the eight whose parents apparently blamed MMR. The interval between his vaccination and the first "behavioural symptom" was reported as 1 week. This symptom was said to have appeared at age 15 months. But his father, whom I had tracked down, said this was wrong.

"From the information you provided me on our son, who I was shocked to hear had been included in their published study," he wrote to me, after we met again in California, "the data clearly appeared to be distorted."

He backed his concerns with medical records, including a Royal Free discharge summary. Although the family lived 5000 miles from the hospital, in February 1997 the boy (then aged 5) had been flown to London and admitted for Wakefield’s project, the undisclosed goal of which was to help sue the vaccine's manufacturers.

Sadly, CNN couldn't even bother to have a single citation to the actual source text that is uncovering this. Of course they have all sorts of links internal to their site... gotta keep those page clicks up, don't want eyeballs over at the BMJ.

What I am really shocked about is that CNN is breaking form with this article in only presenting a person with a well researched position. Normally they would have the comments about the study being a fraud in the first paragraph, followed by several paragraphs from celebrities talking about how they know more than any doctor and MMR definitely causes autism. And since the piece also mentions that the guy did this for financial gain I expect several paragraphs from a Big Pharma rep(no disclosure that this is who he represents) about tort reform.

Plus, where is the part of how this relates to Michael Jackson? (Seriously though, can CNN go one day without reporting something on MJ?)

Actually, it was a pretty good piece for television journalism, and certainly a step in the right direction. Anderson emphasized the importance of peer reviewed data; the guest speaker explained the difference between correlation and causation; and Gupta pointed out how people are prone to latch on to any convenient explanation, especially in the absence of a known explanation. The guest speaker pointed out how finding one flat earther and putting him in a national debate against a round earther created a false equivalence, and Gupta agreed. Jenny McCarthy was cited as the flat earther, more or less, and that her propaganda in the absence of evidence was potentially putting lives at risk by convincing parents not to vaccinate. They pointed out the consequences of a lack of herd immunity, such as the quarantine in San Diego due to a whooping cough infection. All in all, it was one of the better pieces they've done, so either you didn't watch it through, or you weren't paying attention.

That said, the piece was followed by what appeared to be a personal plea by Anderson Cooper to keep Camille Grammer on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, so we haven't quite exited the Twilight Zone just yet.

Thanks for the clarification about the piece. I must confess that I didn't pay adequate attention. I was in a restaurant and they had the sound turned off. Listening to Jenny McCarthy is bad enough. Reading Jenny McCarthy dialogue in the closed captioning something I am simply not willing to do.

They never do it with any of the hard sciences. You'll never see a report on the Space Station where after they've talked with a guy from NASA they go "and now we must talk to Barry, who thinks space is just a carpet painted by God!"

My Chiropractor's been blaming vaccinations for 10 years. Somehow, it took two generations to work. My mom and her cohorts got these vaccines in the 50s. None of them got Autism. It requires more research than I have the patience to do.

Don't knock Jenny. She worked for years at the "MTV Spring Break Live and Biological Research Laboratories". Her extensive research into autism and wet t-shirts is highly respected around the world. She is uniquely qualified to comment on matters critical to public health and matters concerning T&A. I look forward to her next research paper on gravitational wave detection and the structural limits of bikini tops.

Because basing all of your ideas on shoddy research that has been proven to be falsified is never a good strategy, regardless of how much money you have. McCarthy is convinced she knows the cause of her child's autism, and all the scientific evidence (or lack thereof) in the world are not going to convince her to change her opinions. Her mind is pretty closed on this subject I would say. When you have ex-playboy models claiming to have better scientific knowledge of a disease than actual doctors in the field do themselves, it is time to take anything she says with a rather large grain of salt.

Big Pharma doesn't primarily harm people by putting dangerous additives in their products. They primarily harm people by lobbying the US Congress to make it illegal to buy the same drug from Canada for 1/3 the price.

Why is this sad? Big Pharma at least provides benefits for the money they make. Junk science is more than happy to take your money, and give you placebos and ignorance in return. I think it's good that there's more money in Big Pharma than Junk Science.

Ideally, there would be more money in almost anything than in Junk Science.

It sort of depends on what you're allergic to. And as we age, we naturally tend to become allergic to more and more things. The only real way, e.g., that I could avoid Oak Tree pollen is to move to some place where oak trees wouldn't grow. Texas, maybe. Perhaps Washington (state). (I haven't researched this, as that's a foolish approach. You move, and then it turns out that at some time of year the new environment has something you're *more* allergic to than you were to the place you left.) It's not like I'm only allergic to one thing. (And the same either is, or probably will be, true of you.)

But allergies aren't something that anyone makes much money off of. Not if they're treated properly. (If you just take an anti-histamine, then either your allergies are minor, or you really *should* see a good allergist.)

That said, one of the things the allergist would say is to avoid the substances you are allergic to. Which he would identify for you. (Though he might miss a few. The allergist didn't catch that I was allergic to bell peppers, but I did, and they're easy enough to avoid. But he found many that I had no way of identifying. Dust mites, e.g., are essentially invisible. Special cases around the mattress and pillows worked marvels.)

There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of big pharma, and they certainly shouldn't be allowed to forbid others to produce a drug that they refuse to produce. But it's also true that they've done a lot of important work, and are still doing more. Still...

I *do* think things would be improved if every firm that became so large it controlled more than 1/10th of the market was automatically dissolved. Or maybe it's tax rate should just be the same as it's share of the market. With no allowances for business expenses. So small firms would pay no tax, and as they got larger, they paid more taxes. (As stated, this is obviously impossible. Firms work in more than one market, e.g. But the basic idea seems good. The devil is in the details of how one says it.) Note that this is the kind of thing that the income tax was supposed to be, and never became. So the details are VERY important.

You can't build a "natural immunity" to the flu. That's why there's a new vaccine every year. And doctors already only recommend flu shots for "at risk" people, such as those with weak immune systems where the flu can be deadly.

Also, I'm curious about your theory on how one could build an immunity on their own for, say, Smallpox or Tetanus.

Lastly, only a relatively small number of vaccines contain a live version of the infectious agent. So the vast majority of vaccines do not actually cause an infection.

Huh? You get lowered immunity from a vaccination. I don't think you understand how vaccines work.

Also, you're ignoring what I have said to you directly, and what others in this thread have also mentioned: herd immunity, which benefits people around you by keeping you from becoming infectious after you've been exposed to the disease.

But the big money in Big Pharma has a by product of curing people. See MMR Vaccine. The big money in junk science has a by product of leaving people vulnerable to easily cured diseases. See MMR linked to autism.

Okay. Let's look at this clearly: Big Pharma is a mixed bag of positive and negative. They have undeniably provided products of great benefit to human health. And there is also undeniably many cases of them providing unnecessary vanity products, unintentionally harmful products, and products they knew were harmful or useless which they skewed data to get approved. I have lots of problems with Big Pfizer^H^H^H^H^Hharma.

Junk science is not a mixed bag. At best it causes people to get ripped off buying placebos, and at worst causes significant harm by making people not seek real medical treatment when they need it, or not vaccinate their kids so you get outbreaks of measels or whooping cough that affect not just their children, but the children of people who didn't buy into the junk science.

Please let us not talk about these things as if they are equal. There should be lots of money in legitimate pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, but we should also push to solve the problems with it. The problem with junk science, homeopathy, anti-vaccination movements, etc is the junk science itself.

How about we ask the same questions about the people who stand to make huge amounts of money from "green" technologies and scams like carbon exchanges when they're mandated by governments in response to the "science" they've created. Or the "scientists" who falsify data, peddle shoddy work, or change the results to suit their own ideological biases. Or the insanely huge amount of government funding that they've appropriated by creating a regulatory environment that not only employs them, but only funds research devoted to one specific possible result?

I don't give a damn who funds what research. If the science is solid it doesn't matter who paid for it. Science that attempts to discredit research which may be contrary to their preferred results is not science. It's religion, and a bad one.

Asbestos is a very poor example. There are many, many cases where asbestos is actually safe for use. The problem with asbestos is that it become more lucrative, by far, to be anti-asbestos than the industry itself. Hell, removal of perfectly safe asbestos these days actually requires a team of hazmat workers, following hazmat procedures.

The biggest problems with asbestos came from using it as a fibrous insulator whereby fibers and particulate are easily shed and then inhaled. This, of course, created a hazard for installers and post-construction workers and inhabitants every time the material is disturbed. On the other hand, asbestos has far, far more uses than simple insulation, which is why you find it everywhere in old products and buildings. Some are dangerous. Some are now. Law suites and mitigation procedures make absolutely no distinction.

To be clear, I'm not saying asbestos has zero risk. I'm saying the risk has been far, far overblown because its far more lucrative to do so. Most people don't realize that common silica sand is far more hazardous to its workers - that is, if not properly mitigated. In fact, Silicosis [wikipedia.org] is the primary reason so many quarry workers died when the first power tools were introduced to aid them. Back then, they didn't know about it and didn't use water and respirators to mitigate the silica dust. Back then, the life expectancy was 6-8 months. Thusly, the first quarry power tool was dubbed, "The Window Maker".

Hell, removal of perfectly safe asbestos these days actually requires a team of hazmat workers, following hazmat procedures.

Here's my story relating to that. We were renovating a building built in the early 1900s and tore out the floor tiles from a room and threw them away them in our dumpster. The driver from our trash company came to pick up the dumpster, saw the tiles, and refused to take the dumpster. He said those types of tiles frequently have asbestos and the trash company wasn't legally licensed to deal with it.

So I took one of the tiles out of the trash, and sent it to a lab to have it analyzed. The tile wasn't asbestos, the adhesive didn't have asbestos, but it did have a fireproofing layer in between them which had asbestos. The refuse company wouldn't touch it, so we had to hire a full-blown asbestos removal company to deal with it. For $12,000 they tented the entrance to the building in plastic, taped up all the windows, and set up filtered fans to create back-pressure so any airborne asbestos would be caught by the filters. A dozen guys dressed in full hazmat suits and masks went in, broke up the floor tiles with sledgehammers, and carried out the pieces in double-wrapped heavy-duty plastic bags. Overall they carted out a couple hundred pounds of tile, and probably two dumpster-loads of plastic, tape, and used hazmat suits.

All for asbestos which was literally sealed between rock and glue. The whole thing struck me as a huge over-reaction to the scope of the problem. If the stuff was dangerous enough to warrant that level of precaution, everyone who was alive during the years when it was widely used should've died of lung cancer while they were young.

"... is an American adult model, comedian, actress, author, and activist/murderer whose ardent anti-vaccine quackery has doomed an unknown number of children to painful deaths by otherwise controllable diseases." [Emphasis mine]

That's a particularly misleading website. They are essentially trying to claim that Jenny McCarthy's criticism of the MMR vaccine makes her responsible for infant death due to influenza (which is what most of the deaths listed are attributed to). The flu vaccine rarely works, there is little evidence that vaccines are effective on infants, and there is no evidence that the parents of these children refused any vaccines for them.

Personal attacks and deliberate misrepresentation of data are the exact opposite

The small pox vaccine was an unusually aggressive vaccine giving severe complication to 1 out of 1.000.000 vaccinated (think hit by lightning). Very few other vaccines are anywhere as dangerous. I think the hepatitis vacinne is the most dangerous of the common vaccines now, and it just gives you joint-pain for a few days if you are unlucky.

Sorry, that was not my point. Of course no one should be vaccinated against small pox (unless they research the stuff).

My point was that small pox vaccines is a bad example because it was the most dangerous vaccine ever used generally, there was a real risk involved getting it, and even that risk was quite small. If you are using small pox as an example, you are distorting the issue with extreme examples.

Modern vaccines are not anywhere near as dangerous and vaccinates against diseases that still are commonplace, even in majority vaccinated populations. If 85% is vaccinated, you are still taking a risk by being among the 15%, because statics shows that people are still getting the disease, which means the disease can still harm your kid more than the mostly imaginary threats associated with vaccination.

This is called "herd immunity" - if 90% or so are immune, the disease cannot transmit frequently enough to infect the remaining 10%.

However, this ONLY affects diseases that spread via human-to-human contact. If the disease is able to transmit via, say, animals, or can lay dormant for some time, the herd immunity is compromised.

There is also the fact that even with vaccination, some people will catch the disease. Even if it's only a 1% failure rate, that can exacerbate the problem of people not vaccinating enough to compromise herd immunity.

Sad but true. CNN had some guy on last night who was an autism-vaccination believer, they asked him if this changed his opinion, his answer, predictably enough "not one bit". Seriously, WTF, do you really care about what might have caused your child's autism or not? I think people have some much time, effort and rage involved in blaming vaccines that they can't allow the cognitive dissonance of accepting the idea that it may have all been a waste of time. Time that could have been spent actually helping the

...Seriously, WTF, do you really care about what might have caused your child's autism or not? I think people have some much time, effort and rage involved in blaming vaccines that they can't allow the cognitive dissonance of accepting the idea that it may have all been a waste of time. Time that could have been spent actually helping their children and looking for the real cause and a cure.

I've got a close friend with a son with autism and this is his take on the subject. He is, perhaps, on some level curious if something environmental caused his autism, but it's not productive in any way for him as a parent to waste a lot of time or attention on it or on chasing some elusive "cure" the likes of which isn't even hinted at thus far. A better use of his time and attention is making sure his kid has the best therapies and education available right now. Even if a stranger had jumped out of the bushes and injected autism into your kid? So what? It's done. Now that he has it, what are you going to do now?

As a researcher myself, this whole thing has pissed me off because of all of the manhours/years and research dollars spent chasing this red herring was wasted and would have been better-spent following more promising, actual leads.

This has grown beyond Wakefield now. It's become a self-sustaining conspiracy theory, independant of it's source, and no mere facts are going to even slow it down. Parents want to worry, it's in their instincts to protect their children - if they can find no real dangers, they'll inflate anything that looks remotely threatening regardless of true risk.

No, some parents are worse; some of us manage to maintain reason even in the face of reports of possible danger. For instance my daughter was due to be vaccinated in 2000, pretty-much at the height of the reports of possible links between the MMR vaccine and autism. We still had her vaccinated, and a great many other parents had their children vaccinated too.

That's not to say that parenthood doesn't change you to some degree, of course it does. However suggesting that we all become shitbrained morons where our kids are concerned simply isn't fair.

It's easy for even the most balanced parents to go a bit unhinged under the mountain of screaming noise that says "BUT WHAT IF IT HAPPENED?!?!? HOW WOULD YOU EVER LIVE WITH YOURSELF?!??!?"

We're trying hard to raise our kid with a solid sense of self-preservation and street-smarts, but it's a constant fight with relatives, friends, and anyone else who buys into the "YOU MUST PROTECT YOUR CHILD FROM EVERYTHING" mantra. (I'm trying to figure out how the world is less safe now that your kid can have a cell phone and be reachable at any moment - when I grew up you were expected to be completely unreachable for hours at a time. Just be back inside before the street lights turned on...)

Parents are worse. I know several otherwise very reasonable people who gets absolutely shitbrained whenever they are evaluating fictional threats to their child.

(personal anecdote disclaimer)

When we had our first son, I asked questions to evaluate potential threats of the real (not imagined) variety. As an example, some vaccines contain a mercury-based preservative called Thimerosol [wikimedia.org] (though this is now being phased out in the US and several other countries). I decided that if there were any vaccination choices that would let me choose to NOT have a known neurotoxin introduced to my child's body, I'd take it. (Some may say, "oh, but the amount of mercury is so ve

The sample size of 'non-immunized kids' based on their original claim is 100%.

Why? because they originally claimed it was the mercury preservatives in vaccines, and, what's more, they claimed they could cure some of the autism that way by using heavy-metal-poisoning treatment.

As such, vaccine companies stopped almost entirely using mercury-based preservatives in 1999.

Autism has not gone down, and the quackery has moved on to claiming the vaccines themselves are causing the problem, despite no one even vaguely knowing how this could work. (The mercury theory was based on bad science, the current theory doesn't appear to be based on anything at all.)

Is it reasonable to expect that now that there would be a sizable sample size of "non-immunized" kids, that a study to compare the rates of autism between the two groups will be done?

Already done in 2002. There was a study done in Denmark (where there are comprehensive medical records for the whole population) that showed no link between MMR vaccination and autism rates.

A Danish study of more than half a million children showed no link between measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination and autism.In a commentary accompanying the study, which was published in the , Dr Edward Campion, senior deputy editor, wrote, “This careful and convincing study shows that there is no association between autism and MMR vaccination.”

Lead author Dr Kreesten Meldgaard Madsen, an epidemiologist and expert on infectious diseases at the Danish Epidemiology Science Centre in Aarhus, told the BMJ that the study showed that the risk of autism was similar in children who were vaccinated and children who were not.

The study reviewed records of 537303 children born in Denmark between January 1991 and December 1998, representing almost 100% of children born in that period. Of these children 440655 had been vaccinated.* Records were retrieved from three sources: the unique identification number assigned to each child at birth; MMR vaccination data reported to the National Board of Health by general practitioners, who give all MMR vaccinations and are reimbursed for their reports; and diagnoses of autism recorded in the Danish Psychiatric Central Registry. Only specialists in child psychiatry diagnose autism and related conditions.

Hey, look,it's a moron who's out of date and hence peddling the old junk science.

Mercury has not been used in vaccine preservation since 1999, you moron. Because of idiots like you claiming the mercury was causing autism (Mercury does not cause autism, it causes quite recognizable mercury poisoning, which is much closer to insanity than autism), the companies stopped using it.

So a completely different vaccine has the same effect: autism! I have another explanation that is much more plausible: people who tend to believe in wild conspiracy theories have a 3 times higher risk of having children with autism.

It's the same reason they moved from 'mercury poisoning' when vaccine companies stopped using it and autism didn't go down.

This is exactly the same sort of 'science' as 'intelligent design'...it's 'invent a position and desperately scrabble around for any possible reason it could be true, and latch onto it until someone disproves it, and then latch onto something else that proves the same thing.

Yeah, you can actually figure out how plausible a scientific position is the more the facts change and people (are forced to) accept the new facts, but then still argue the same conclusion.

And it's not really even the same 'conclusion'. It's past the conclusion. It's the same 'So now that we've figured that out, the thing we should do is...'

If I stand there and argue, on a trip, that we should drive down, say, highway 141 to get to Gainesville, and it's pointed out that highway 141 doesn't go to Gainesville, and so I argue that we should drive down 141 to get some Taco Bell, and it's pointed out that there's a Taco Bell on the actual route to Gainesville, and then I argue that Gainesville is a stupid place to go and we should go to Lawrenceville down 141 instead, and it's pointed out while that's technically possible, that's not a very good way to get to Lawrenceville...

At some point, people really should realize I obviously have a motive to drive down 141, because every single plan I invent involves driving down 141.

Likewise, at some point people need to realize the climate change deniers have some sort of motive to not do anything about climate change. (What that motive is is rather obvious if you look at the funding sources.)

But even if you knew nothing who was funding that, it's clear there is some motive, because every. single. one. of their conclusions is 'We shouldn't do anything', no matter what facts they've decided to finally accept. It might exist, it might not, it might be us, might be the sun or volcanoes, it might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing, whatever it is, we sure as heck shouldn't demand people change their behavior, ever.

Same with the anti-vaccine crowd. First it was mercury in vaccines, then it was this study, now I'm sure some other bogus thing will come up. But every single solution is 'less vaccines'. Actually, if you look real close, you'll see every single solution is 'traditional medicine bad, alternative medicine good'.

People who sit and argue the same 'problem solution' despite the problem constantly changing are dishonest, and not scientists, and people need to stop listening and call them out on it the very first time they do that.

It's a sad world when some money-grubbing fool can publish a fudged article claiming that a vital, lifesaving tool can cause horrible, debilitating disease, get international attention, and when he's finally disproven all the "concerned parents" of the world ignore him because The Man wants to keep their kids autistic, without sparing a thought to the possiblity that maybe The Other Man just wanted a quick buck.

Everyone knows how conspiracy theories work. All the wingnuts will just claim this is a political chop job designed to cover up Big Brother/Big Pharma's Big Evil plan. The BBC could play video next week of Wakefield snorting coke and doing an underage hooker, all the while shouting that he had falsified his results, and it wouldn't matter. At some point they'd probably decide that Wakefield was a deep-cover government plant intended to discredit the movement.

The problem with any vaccine-conspiracy is that it makes no sense. Big Pharma makes far more on drugs for treating illness, with drugs that cost much much more than vaccines (which are produced competitively by several companies and have government price controls).

So why would they do this elaborate conspiracy that *reduces* their income?

I'd also say there's a whole bunch of "back in the day we just called those kid's weird". I know lots of people of varying ages who if they were kids today would have been diagnosed with some form of autism spectrum disorder, it's not that these people weren't here, most of us grew up with them, hell a lot of us are them, that's just not what people like that were called back then.

Autism prevalence is increasing. Not just the absolute number of cases, but the rate among the general population. I've yet to see a single study that says otherwise... can you provide a cite for your oddball claim? The increase is definitely NOT proportional to our population growth.

But looking at your post...

proportionally risen to the acceleration of our population growth

Are you saying that rate of growth in autism is proportion to the acceleratio

As mentioned in the above program, dozens of studies have already failed to duplicate Wakefield's findings. Essentially, he blamed autism on a mercury-base preservative that was found in vaccines administered to babies. Even though there was no proof that this preservative had anything to do with autism, manufacturers ceased to use it in vaccines, but this only caused the anti-vaccine to go hypothesis hunting once more.

Because the final in-depth analysis has been published by the journal which originally published Wakefield's findings.

Wakefield's original fraudulent study was published in The Lancet in 1998, and fully retracted by that journal's editors in early 2010 (after the UK's General Medical Council found that he had engaged in serious ethical lapses in the course of his research). The commentary discussing the case and referred to in the Slashdot summary appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Both are very respected medical journals, but they are distinct.

Because this not only debunks the study (which has been debunked for a few years now), it proves Wakefield manufactured the entire thing. He altered data, misrepresenting each case -- for instance, while Wakefield claimed none of the subjects exhibited signs of autism, medical records show that 5 of the 12 had already been shown to have autism. Further investigation shows that all twelve cases had been misrepresented to various degrees.

Also, Wakefield misrepresented the study to the doctors from whom he received referrals. He called it a "clinical trial," not a study.

Basically, this investigation proves that Wakefield was not simply careless; he intentionally fictionalized the entire study.

We can no longer attribute to incompetency that which is demonstrably malicious.

Seems to me that not taking a mercury-based substance is a good outcome, regardless of the other shenanigans.

Indeed. Although I've asked many, many health professionals, none could tell me why thimerosal (the mercury presevative used in vaccines) was used as opposed to the raft of other potential presevatives. Thimerosal is toxic in general to humans; it rapidly releases the bound mercury that then concentrates in the central nervous system and kidneys. Mercury, like other heavy metals, is a very serious neurotoxin.

Given that any exposure above zero to lead has slowly become recognized as hazardous, it baffles

Yes, it was dumb to use thimerosal. It's an yet another example of our medical industry trimming every last dime. There's not really a lot of reason to use preservatives at all...we're not selling them at the damn grocery store. Keep them refrigerated, produce them somewhat local.

OTOH, it was also dumb to propose that as a reason for autism. We know what mercury poisoning looks like (Think 'mad as a hatter'...that's mercury poisoning), and that ain't it.

Mercury's not good for you, heavy metals aren't good for you, but it's rather incomprehensible it would cause autism...for one thing, autism is on the rise, whereas heavy metal exposure has gone dramatically down since the 1960s and we invented the EPA and actually stopped poisoning ourselves. Yes, there were less diagnoses of autism back then, perhaps much much less, but statistically, if early heavy metals exposure caused autism, something like a tenth of people over 70 would have autism, and I think we'd notice that now even if we hadn't diagnosed them back then.

Hell, back then, children were eating lead paint chips off the wall and touching mercury in science class.

For the nay-sayers, no, I don't eat tuna or other high-mercury fish, either, for the same reason. And, IAAN (I am a neuroscientist).

I have to wonder how many of those people who blamed it on mercury with no evidence, and distributed things blaming it on mercury, continued to eat fish, and one serving of fish can give you more mercury than an entire line of childhood vaccines could even hypothetically do. I wonder how many of these crackpots were fish and chicken vegetarians, and thus their kids had more fish and more mercury than normal children who also ate cow and pig and whatnot.

I wonder how many of them, after years of being 'sure' it was the mercury in vaccines, because mercury was an evil evil evil thing, now worry about mercury since it's been removed from vaccines. Although a lot of the anti-vaccine people don't even appear to know that.

What really amazes me about this business is the behavior of the mainstream media in relation to the development of this 'story' in the first place.

Wakefields paper was just a collection of 12 anecdotes - meaningless in any clinical sense. He's clearly an idiot and should simply have been struck off and ignored.

You don't need to be an expert to work out that MMR and autism are both fairly common, and to find some cases of kids that have both is not that unusual - certainly not enough to start the newspaper and TV frenzy that occurred. That the media decided not to ignore him and tried instead to promote the scare, is to their great shame.

What is also incredible is the fact that that media deliberately ignored studies that proved no connection at all between MMR and autism.

It's appalling that this effort to boost ratings almost certainly cost the lives of infants and probably still does.

it is hard to quantify, but the amount of idiots of didn't get their kids vaccinated because of this guy's "research" probably resulted in many unnecessary deaths of children. and this includes children who were vaccinated: an effective vaccine relies on "herd immunity". if enough kids are resistant to say, whooping cough, whooping cough can't get a leg up into a given population. but if enough aren't immune, the disease gets a certain amount of circulation in the community, and is able to try to infect many more kids. eventually, it is able to infect kids of parents who dutifully got their kids vaccinated (since for every vaccination, many vaccines don't take), and eventually, it is able to kill many kids

oh, and someone infect jenny mccarthy with whooping cough, that ignorant bitch. let her know what her "advocacy" really means

Even if thimerosal were mercury, it has no relevant place in the anti-vaccine argument since there was no correlating decline in autism cases when it was removed from children's vaccines. Autism diagnoses have continued to rise in the wake of the questionable thimerosal ban and the rising numbers of the unvaccinated, which all but confirms that thimerosal was nothing more than a needless distraction.

Anti-vaxxers still bring out the ghost of thimerosal because having an opportunity to name drop "mercury" makes them appear to be more serious and educated than they actually are. The first step in reintroducing rationality and logic to an anti-vaxxer is to nip that particular argument in the bud.

I completely agree with you and I like the salt analogy, but I wouldn't even give them that much leeway.

You do realize that the rate of autism, i.e. the number of cases per 1,000 people, is also increasing? In other words, when accounting for increasing in population, there is a rise in the rate of autism.

That is the question people are trying to answer. Personally, I think a large chunk of it is probably explained by higher rates of diagnosis. More kids who wouldn't have been label autistic back in the day are now being labeled. Whether it's really justified or not, is another question.

#1 The growth rate of autism also correlates to a decrease in diagnoses of mental retardation. Special education and allied health therapies have improved in the past few decades such that we can more accurately differentially diagnose various types of developmental disorders. #2. And the increased focus on early intervention means we can now mitigate the severity of developmental disorders so that someone born with autism may not necessarily be severely mentally retarded as they would have been in the 1970s or '80s. #3. Finally, we've become so convinced that there is an "epidemic" that there is more money and services available for autism spectrum disorders relative to other developmental disabilities, so that any kid who displays any autistic-like qualities is likely to be identified as ASD because it opens a lot of doors for getting services that might not be otherwise available.

That's not to say it isn't increasing, but the numbers may not be saying what you think they are saying.

Personally, I think a large chunk of it is probably explained by higher rates of diagnosis. More kids who wouldn't have been label autistic back in the day are now being labeled. Whether it's really justified or not, is another question.

Bingo. Not a very popular stance, but I'm guessing it is the closest to the actual truth of the matter. We've expanded the diagnostic criteria of autism spectrum "diseases" to the point of being utterly meaningless. Around 90% of the people I was friends with in the early 90's (before the autism craze) would probably be placed somewhere in the autism spectrum if they were youths today. I, too, would have probably been autistic, or at least "suffering" aspergers. Luckily this was the early 90's and we all just got ADD/ADHD instead.

I am happy that the APA (organizers of the DSM) are planning on removing aspergers from the new addition, in order to force mental health professionals to either diagnose autism or nothing, which might cut down over-diagnosis levels a bit.

When I was first venturing into psychology as a field of study, one of my early professors was very quick to point out that everyone has symptoms of a very large array of listed mental illnesses, but what keeps you from being actually mentally ill is the ability to function normally. If you are capable of having long terms friends, a wife, a steady job, etc.. you probably are not "mentally ill". As "illness" generally (used to be) taken as "an impediment to normal functioning". This isn't saying such modern vogue diseases don't exist, but are VERY overdiagnosed. There are people running around proclaiming aspergers or adult-ADD who have large happy families, well paying jobs with long-term stability, and an active social life, these people are not sick, since they are functioning at a high level.

I'm not sure of all the causes of this largely purely social phenomena; but part of it is the huge pressure pharma exerts on doctors, and the fact that parents want results. If parents, or teachers, aren't happy with little Billy's performance or personality, then they will shop around until someone agrees with them. As a doctor, you might as well diagnose, because if you don't someone else will. My dad this this when I was young (mostly as a political maneuver in a divorce, with a bit of influence from some overworked teachers), he took me to around five doctors until one of them decided I must have ADD, and perhaps some flavor of clinical depression. (without ever actually talking to me).

Another thing is that parents ignore natural variation. Someone I know is trying to get their kid diagnosed with autism because she hasn't spoken by the time she turned 3 years old. While this might be unusual, it isn't unheard of, or even that problematic. It is well within the natural variation of human development.

The mortality of measles is about 0.3% - 3 kids in 1000 that contract it will die. Your sample size simply means nothing. That's why you leave epidemiology to the experts and don't recklessly endanger not only your kids but everyone they come in contact with by refusing vaccination. In my opinion, it should simply be mandated by law. Parents refusing to vaccinate are clearly unfit for their role, their kids are better off if their asshat parents get thrown into the slammer and the kids set up for adoption.

Vaccination acts as a sort of firebreak or firewall in the spread of the disease, slowing or preventing further transmission of the disease to others.[3] Unvaccinated individuals are indirectly protected by vaccinated individuals, as the latter will not contract and transmit the disease between infected and susceptible individuals.[2] Hence, a public health policy of herd immunity may be used to reduce spread of an illness and provide a level of protection to a vulnerable, unvaccinated subgroup. Since only a small fraction of the population (or herd) can be left unvaccinated for this method to be effective, it is considered best left for those who cannot safely receive vaccines because of a medical condition such as an immune disorder or for organ transplant recipients.

The more people who opt out of vaccines, the greater the likelihood of these diseases making a comeback. That's why you've never seen the measles or the mumps.

I threw away a few mod points to reply so I hope it sinks in that after a 74% drop in measles deaths it is now as harmless as yellow fever, if it drops by a further 74% it will be as harmless as rabies.

Regardless of whether or not it affects the body in the same way as elemental mercury, thiomersal is rated at the maximum toxicity health levels by the USA (Highly Toxic), EU (Very Toxic), and NFPA (blue 3 for health) ratings, and has a cumulative effect.

But that condemns children to die because of their parents ignorance and irrationality.

I want vaccination to happen in schools once again, and I want all children to be vaccinated unless they bring a letter from a medical doctors that states the child has a medical reason for not getting one. Like allergic to the vaccine. And each vaccine needs a letter for that specific vaccine.

There is a problem with letting mornic parents do there own thing. It can (and does) hurt the children of responsible parents too.

There are two main ways for the children of a responsible parent to come down with one of these childhood diseases:

1) The vaccine just "didn't take". It happens. They aren't perfect. However, if EVERYONE was vaccinated, this wouldn't matter, as the disease would be eradicated (or nearly so), and then you don't have to worry about catching it. Instead, kids where it didn't take pick it up from kids whose parents were morons.2) A child is too young to be vaccinated. These vaccines are not administered at birth, and some of them require several doses before immunity is achieved. It is quite possible to pick up the disease from the child of a vaccination-refusing parent. To top things off, the older unvaccinated child is more likely to survive the disease, while the newborn is quite vulnerable.

Yes, it is possible for the diseases to be transmitted solely among children with failed vaccines or those that are too young to be vaccinated, but those cases are quite rare. Measles was well on the way to being eradicated in the Western World before this clown came along. Imagine what a disaster it would have been if this guy was peddling his quackery prior to the eradication of smallpox or the near-eradication of polio.

More interesting if the parents of some of the hundreds who have died sued him or even better if a few prosecutors put together a few hundred homicide cases. After all, he intentionally published fraudulent results that he logically would have know was going to lead people to not vaccinate their kids. This guy deserves more than financial ruin, he deserves to go to jail, he used the instruments of science to kill hundreds, possibly thousands of children; where the hell are the 'think of the children' nuts

I'd be extremely surprised if ANY mass vaccination campaign and/or medical procedure didn't produce adverse symptoms in at least 1% of people. To put that in context, 1% of people have bodies that, in intersex terms, "differ from standard male or female" - i.e. are of indiscriminate sex. Hell, paracetamol has a higher rate of problems than that in any reasonably effective dose. Unfortunately, it's impossible to take you seriously because:

You're daughter probably had a reaction to the vaccine. It happens. It happens far less than the rate of Mumps, Measles, and Rubella would in the absence of vaccine, so on the balance of probability, I'd still vaccinate my kids.

You of all people should be angry with the anti-vaxxers. Herd immunity would protect your daughter since the vaccine can't due to her adverse reaction, but anti-vaxxers have dropped the rate of vaccination below the herd immunity level, and now we're seeing outbreaks where childre

But we're not throwing Wakefield to the wolves because he was wrong. Lots of scientists are wrong, it's okay. And it's not because he spoke with bias for a hypothesis he believed in. That's okay too. Wakefield's crimes are 1) deliberately falsifying and modifying data to fit his theory, and 2) doing so for profit without disclosing a conflict of interest.

The East Anglia CRU emails, which I assume are the hotbuttons you're pushing at the moment, show scientists with strong opinions, possibly putting a little spin on their presentations, but there is no evidence that they falsified data or took money under the table for their activities.

Thimerosol (sp?), the trace-murcury-containing preservative you are thinking of, is no longer used in US childhood disease vaccines. Hasn't been for many years. And when it was gone, whadda-know, autism rates didn't drop.

In general, yes, the idea of the government mandating medical treatment is scary.

But, in the case of vaccines, I'm happy to make an exception. There are three miracles of medicine in the 19th/20th century: The germ theory of medicine that led to proper medical hygiene, antibiotics, and vaccines. All three were responsible for massive improvements in the efficacy of medicine.

However, for vaccines to be as effective as they are, they need to be mandatory except in cases where there's a legitimate reason to